Recovery is the loneliest number

Can we be friends?

When I first pulled into Crack Alley, it seemed a bright and joyous place. It was a hot summer day. Everyone was slurping Freezies. Someone was laughing hysterically because they got splashed with a bottle of water.

You wouldn’t imagine this downtown Hamilton parking lot was an open-air drug market.

It was designed like that. Its proprietor, who rarely showed up at the scene, put all his people in the right places. There was the ‘greeter’ – a bright-smiled woman, perched in a lounge chair at the edge of the lot. Her job was simply to holler, ‘Front door’ when someone approached. And, if that someone was in uniform, she’d add, somewhat louder, ‘Five-Oh.’

That was the signal for everyone to scatter. Cops incoming.

There were actually two dealers, both standing at the base of a rickety old fire escape. That’s where you placed your order. Then you were directed to an alley that ended in a brick wall. That was called the Waiting Room.

‘Behind the yellow line, people!’ one of the dealers would shout when someone got a little too antsy for their order. But, like a perfectly honed machine, the order always came through. Each little wrapped package of dope was hand-delivered to the client.

It was in the Waiting Room where I made most of my friends. Thanks to the many hours I spent there, I got to mingle with the rest of the addicts. Sometimes, we’d hit it off so famously, I’d even invite them back to my place.

The dope was always on me.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, it was probably the first time in my life that I felt at home. You see, I’d been a journalist in a big city for decades, hobnobbing with all kinds of scenesters – spilling martinis and cocaine all over ourselves.

But I never felt at home in that culture. It always seemed a little off. Like everyone was trying just a bit too hard. But when I mingled with the denizens of Crack Alley, it was easy. No one tried too hard to impress. We all had a brutally honest assessment of ourselves: We were broken.

“These are my people,” I used to say to myself.

Now, if only we could find a way not to lie, steal, brutalize and assault each other so often. But even after countless rip-offs, cons and even a concussion, I couldn’t quit the people of Crack Alley.

Until I actually did quit.

When I moved home about nine months ago, I severed all ties to my ‘people’ And I began, perhaps, the loneliest stretch of my entire existence.

Living with my mom, in recovery’s full and despairing embrace, I stopped answering my phone, evacuated social media and made like I was dead to the rest of the world.

But boy, did I miss my friends. I dreamed about them as often as I dreamed about dope.

My family kept telling me it would get better. I’d make a whole new cast of friends. The right kind of friends. And all I could imagine was pot luck dinners, beers at the pub and maybe the occasional Super Bowl party. It seemed I would land right back to where I used to – a misfit in a pool of people I didn’t feel any real connection with.

Then I started attending meetings – Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and a couple of local recovery events.

It was in the basement of the Salvation Army, at a particularly gritty AA meeting, that I felt that old familiar feeling: Now, these are my people. Everyone seemed honest with each other. The stories told at meetings were heartbreaking, hard-luck sagas. People talked about partners overdosing, losing fingers to brutal winter nights, and the kinds of assault we’re all too young to know about. There was a lot of love in the room – so much so that my heart swelled whenever one of the street-seasoned old-timers took a turn. I just wanted to hug them all.

The thing is, at these meetings, you do end up hugging them all. Or, at least, most of them.

You get a big embrace from strangers right at the door. And at the end of every meeting, a circle is formed, hands folded into hands.

As you might imagine, in my friend-starved state, I feasted on my new community. From the start, everyone pledged their love and support for each other.

“I’d go through a wall for anyone in this room,” one struggling addict growled. And I believed him.

After meetings, I’d excitedly tell my mother about all my new friends. I had so many new numbers on my phone. I could reach out to anyone at any hour for anything. These former alcoholics and addicts had all the same qualities I adored in my former crack-smoking society – minus the viciousness.

Of course, I figured, having lost their habit, they didn’t have to engage in the various brutalities required to support it. They were left only with the sweet, honest, almost child-like qualities that drew me to drug culture in the first place.

My people, indeed.

The thing is – and this is a pattern in my life – when I find something I like, I tend to fill my boots. I oversubscribed to this shiny new society. I hosted meetings on my mom’s patio. I even started a walking club.

And, as you might expect, from there on in, it was just a series of cascading disappointments.

On the way out from one recovery meeting, a former addict eyed a young girl walking in front of us.

“Just the way I like them,” he said. “Young, petite and broken.”

Yet more cracks appeared in the beautiful facade. It grew apparent that some of the people who attended meetings weren’t there for a sense of community. They were just straight-up sex-starved. And what better place to find equal measures of desperation? But I could handle that. Where else are former addicts – people whose honest Tinder profiles would be terrifying – expected to hook up?

Then there was the hierarchy. At every meeting, there’s a panel of recovery ‘experts’, whose credentials are essentially how long they’ve managed to stay clean. These pillars of the recovery community sometimes seemed to give off a ‘Cleaner-Than-Thou’ vibe.

In fact, while pouring my heart out to one of these pillars, I broached a question that had long been on my mind.

“What happens,” I asked. “I mean, if I relapse. What happens?”

After a solemn pause over his hot chocolate at the local coffee shop, my friend responded thusly:

“Think of all the friends you made in the last few weeks. How much your life has changed. You’ve got a community that cares for you now – and they don’t care about your money or your dope. They just care about you.”

Boy, did that ever sound good.

“Now, if you lapse,” he continued. “It all goes away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they would still care about you and wish you the best,” he went on. “But their sobriety has to come first. You would be dangerous to them. So they’d take a step back.

“Even you?” I asked.

“Even me.”

At that moment, a month into my recovery, I was probably one dark alley away from having a relapse. Just get it over with then, I thought. Give me all the crack. I didn’t want to be disappointed in people again.

If I lapsed, shouldn’t friends draw closer to me – not farther? What about that wall they were supposed to go through for me?

Besides that, it reminded me, a little too keenly, of the church culture that I had grown up in. My mom was a bit of a spiritual dilettante, dipping her toes in one church or another. She was probably looking for a sense of community too. For her curiosity, and blossoming skepticism, she was often shunned. At an early age, I witnessed the kind of hurt that resulted. Even older family members – devout Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed only too happy to cast out my doubting mother.

Recovery culture started to feel a little like church culture. There’s a Big Book – this one written by a guy named Bill W. There’s plenty of dogma too. And woe to those who challenged the gospel of recovery. Extra woe to those who lapse.

Of course, I was wrong. Everyone is just as flawed as everyone else, whether a recovering addict or the guy who installs your home internet. One of the many incredibly destructive patterns in my life is a tendency to idealize people – not just try to see the best in them, but to cling to it at the expense of everything else.

“When will you ever learn?” came the ready chorus from both mother and partners.

But then again, I guess I’m hoping that other people do the same for me. Maybe if I can see myself through the blindly accepting eyes of others, I’ll be lovable to me.

Who knows? But at least, I’m over the idea that addicts and former addicts are broken angels – spirits who weren’t made for this world. (Honestly, who wants to know anyone who was actually made for this world, anyway?)

People are people. I just haven’t found mine yet. And maybe I won’t – unless I’m willing to accept them for who they are. Warts, crack pipes, preachiness and all.